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    Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters
    Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters
    Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters
    Ebook171 pages2 hours

    Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters

    By Rebecca Nye

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    About this ebook

    An introduction to the increasingly popular topic of children's spirituality, showing how choices made in churches and homes can stimulate or stifle a child's spiritual development. Suitable for anyone who works with children.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChurch House Publishing
    Release dateAug 4, 2014
    ISBN9780715144121
    Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters

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      Book preview

      Children's Spirituality - Rebecca Nye

      1 Children’s spirituality: what is it?

      What is spirituality?

      delighting in all things

      being absorbed in the present moment

      not too attached to ‘self’ and

      eager to explore boundaries of ‘beyond’ and ‘other’

      searching for meaning

      discovering purpose

      open to more?¹

      Spirituality is like a bird; if you hold it too tightly, it chokes; if you hold it too loosely, it flies away. Fundamental to spirituality is the absence of force.

      Rabbi Hugo Gryn

      Spirituality is not something that likes to be confined in words – which makes writing (and reading) about it horribly difficult! It is more ‘felt–sense’, drawing on non-verbal insights, vision, sound, touch and so on. It can be a powerful kind of knowing that is less worried about proving how you know.

      Because it is powerful, literally inspiring, spirituality also shapes our ways of being. This far-reaching combination of deeply motivated knowing and being ends up in what is referred to in the monastic traditions as a ‘rule of life’, that is, it potentially affects everything.

      This gives spirituality an interesting relationship with verbal language and, of course, religious language. Attempts to define or theorize spirituality are often frustrating. Perhaps this is because a single definition can only capture one part of the whole picture, or because when a definition tries to take in the whole picture you need to stand so far back to see it that there is not much to focus on!

      You might already have a favourite way of defining or thinking about spirituality. If so, it will be useful to be aware of that as you read on. Or you could try now to make up a definition – and perhaps discover how hard it is to get the words to say what you feel about this topic. You could also begin making a collection of other people’s ways of defining spirituality, starting from the few given below, and thinking about what you like and dislike about these.

      Spirituality is . . .

      From theologians

      living fully with nothing excluded from our hearts

      Gerald May

      each believer making his or her own engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith . . . constantly allowed to challenge the fixed assumptions of religiosity

      Rowan Williams

      the search for God in response to God’s search for us

      Jo Anne Taylor

      a conscious involvement in the project of life integration through self transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives

      Sandra Schneiders

      From educators

      spirituality ranges from sensing of divine presence to the recognition of a heightened quality in an event or encounter and a response of awe and wonder

      David Dixon

      signals of transcendence that are normal aspects of life but all at odds with a materialistic understanding of the world, they point to something other – something more . . . can lead people to an awareness of religion

      Brenda Watson

      the sense making activity that both children and adults necessarily carry out as a result of the life experiences they encounter

      Clive Erricker

      From psychologists

      an awareness, response or ability to reflect on areas which are beyond those of individual/ego interest, that is not concerning the individual’s own survival or fortune. To this extent spiritual interests could be termed (apparently) pointless ones

      Margaret Donaldson

      a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto

      William James

      Just jargon?

      Words connected to ‘spirituality’ often crop up in everyday conversation:

      keep your spirits up

      she gave a spirited performance

      that was mean-spirited

      I don’t think I’ve got the spirit for this anymore

      that’s the spirit!

      (there’s even a supermarket own-brand deodorant called ‘Spiritual’!)

      Recently it has been fashionable for many outside the Church to describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’. So when trying to work out what spirituality means, we also need to think about how far we need this to be tied to formal Christian language. Or whether the ‘Christian’ element is more about the outworkings in practice, and not the words or concepts in themselves.

      Christians are certainly used to hearing spirit-related words all the time – in psalms, in choruses and in prayer. Again and again we refer both to God’s Spirit and our own spirit:

      ‘. . . and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’

      ‘The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit’

      ‘My spirit faints within me’ (Psalm 143.4)

      This ‘everydayness’ makes it hard to get spirituality into focus. It’s a struggle to engage with critically and let it inform our practice. It seems so vague that it could mean anything – rather pointless then?

      But perhaps this everyday quality is key to the challenge, especially the challenge of understanding spirituality in childhood. Language connected to spirituality is everywhere, reminding us how wrong it would be to shut spirituality into an exclusive box. Its everydayness in both secular and church language makes the point that spirituality is meant to entail all that we are called to be. So how we think about its meaning must include children.

      Think and discuss . . .

      Are children (of any age) in danger of being excluded by any of the definitions given here, or by ways of defining spirituality known to you?

      What is children’s spirituality?

      The following three definitions approach children’s spirituality from three perspectives:

      1. A very simple definition of children’s spirituality might be:

      God’s ways of being with children and

      children’s ways of being with God.

      For Christians, this definition helps us to remember that children’s spirituality starts with God – it is not something adults have to initiate. God and children (regardless of age or intellect) have ways of being together because this is how God created them. The difficulty comes in trying to appreciate, and support, the ambiguous forms these ways can take.

      2. An evidence-based approach to defining children’s spirituality lets us take things further. My research study of the varied expressions of spirituality evident in children’s lives pinpointed their remarkable capacity for ‘relational consciousness’.² This way of defining spirituality suggests some specific key features:

      Children’s spirituality is an initially natural capacity for awareness of the sacred quality to life experiences. This awareness can be conscious or unconscious, and sometimes fluctuates between both, but in both cases can affect actions, feelings and thoughts. In childhood, spirituality is especially about being attracted towards ‘being in relation’, responding to a call to relate to more than ‘just me’ – i.e. to others, to God, to creation or to a deeper inner sense of Self. This encounter with transcendence can happen in specific experiences or moments, as well as through imaginative or reflective activity (thoughts and meaning making).

      3. Or you might find this definition by analogy an easy, yet valuable, way to start thinking about what children’s spirituality means:

      Children’s spirituality is like a child.

      Think and discuss . . .

      Look again at the three definitions of children’s spirituality.

      Jesus said of children, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me’ (Mark 9.37).

      A fair definition: including children

      One thing to look out for is whether we tend to think about spirituality in ways that depend on having adult capacities, thereby excluding children or indeed others with little (religious) knowledge, or limited intellectual capacities (e.g. people with brain damage or dementia). Being fair and inclusive in how we think about spirituality is important – and not only to those who might otherwise be left out. An inclusive definition can draw attention to areas that would otherwise be overlooked, protecting us from a lopsided understanding and possibly lopsided practices.³

      As adults, we might describe spirituality in terms of particular experiences that can reliably be recalled and talked about, for example, sensing God’s presence. However, to limit children to experiences they can recall and talk about is not really fair, given that they can find it difficult to retrieve memories and put things into words. This helps us to see that a big net is needed – big enough to catch their spiritual experiences, imaginings, views, questions, play and ideas as indicative evidence of children’s

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